Yes, totally, absolutely. It's ridiculous we're talking about the iPhone 12 when Apple hasn't even announced the iPhone 11 yet but… Supply chain exfiltrator extraordinaire Kuo Ming-Chi is back, back again with a new set of 5G rumors and… I have questions.
I talk about all this in the video above. Hit play!
They focus on 5G, which is the hottest cellular networking technology since… you guessed it, 4G. And not the fake AT&T kind. The real kind. And with them, Kuo allows him to correct… himself?
See, here's the deal. Kuo previously, said only two of the 2020 iPhones would have 5G, presumably the regular and Max models, while the third remained on LTE, presumably the R. From MacRumors
We expect that the new 2H20 iPhone lines will include the high-end 6.7-inch and 5.4-inch OLED iPhone models and the low-end 6.1-inch OLED iPhone. The 6.7-inch and 5.4-inch OLED iPhone models will likely support 5G.
Now he's saying all three will be 5G. Which fine, good, great. But what he's saying, at least as reported by MacRumors, is a little harder for me at least to understand.
We now believe that all three new 2H20 iPhone models will support 5G for the following reasons. (1) Apple has more resource for developing the 5G iPhone after the acquisition of Intel baseband business.
Now, maybe I'm dense, maybe it's this heatwave, but I'm having trouble figuring out how Apple closing a deal last week for Intel's modem business will give them more bandwidth to include more Qualcomm 5G modems into next year's iPhones.
Sure, they're getting over 2000 new engineers, and they'll all be well and truly onboarded by then, but if there was a plan to leave the 2020 R without 5G was it really just because there weren't enough hands to push thin modems up into those thin chassis?
Here’s more realistic renders of my 2020 iPhone concept in Gold ✨
I would love to have this iPhone 🔥
Do you? pic.twitter.com/eBHxVGNetZHere’s more realistic renders of my 2020 iPhone concept in Gold ✨
I would love to have this iPhone 🔥
Do you? pic.twitter.com/eBHxVGNetZ— Ben Geskin (@BenGeskin) July 26, 2019July 26, 2019
Again, I may be missing something super obvious, barely an insight here. But that sounds a lot like the mythical person month to me. If any of you way smarter than me people have any ideas about what this all could mean, please do me a solid and drop them in the comments.
(2) We expect that the prices of 5G Android smartphones will decline to $249-349 USD in 2H20. (The second half of 2020)
Kuo believes those phones will be limited to Sub-6GHz, though, which is currently the less impressively fast, more mundane, but also much farther reaching non-city flavor of 5G, and not mmWave, which is the faster, more audacious, but requires a mini-tower or several on basically every city block flavor of 5G.
He seems uncertain, or at least the language used makes me uncertain, if Apple would limit the 2020 R to sub-6G to lower costs for markets like China, or include sub-6G and mmWave to better appeal to the U.S. market. Or both, because, I guess, FOMO YOLO.
The competitive market makes more sense to me as a driver, though Kuo adds one more reason.
Boosting 5G developments could benefit Apple's AR ecosystem.
It's unclear if by ecosystem Kuo is including the AR glasses, long rumored to be Apple's next new product category. Either way, if you want to get AR off of Wi-Fi and out into the world, super-fast, super ubiquitous, super low latency 5G is certainly a huge bonus.
You know, when 5G is actually ubiquitous in a couple to few years from now.
